huxi.

Because someone was going to ask, so I'll go first: I'm a man running a sex toy brand that mostly sells to women. Here's how that happened, and it wasn't a calling.

A couple of years ago a friend asked if I'd go and look at some factories with him. I said yes without asking what they made. I walked in and my jaw hit the floor. I should say at this point that I was, until quite recently, the biggest prude you have ever met. Ask my wife. A conversation about sex at a dinner party and I'd be in the kitchen looking for something to wash up.

Some context on my judgement, so you can weight it. My first business went bust on the day I found out we were having our first child. We'd just bought our first house. I went home that evening and told my wife we might lose it, but the good news was we could move in with her parents for a bit. She stayed. Since then I've run a marketing agency that has done well, and I have a habit of running off after commercial ideas, most of which have come to nothing. She has watched every one of them.

So when I came back from the factory and said the words "sex toys" out loud, I expected the usual. She's a doctor. She thought about it with her doctor hat on and, like the man from Del Monte, she said yes. First time in twenty years. That's the only reason it exists.

But I'd spent twenty-odd years in marketing, and I looked at the place the way I'd look at any client's category. Good factories, no brand, struggling since covid. And one thing so wrong it was almost funny: nobody else sells a product you have to buy blind. Every other premium purchase you can take home, try, and send back. This one, the moment the seal breaks, it's yours. The law says so. The industry was quite happy with that.

I'm at the age where this comes up at dinner now — not as a joke, as a conversation. And what I kept hearing was the same thing in different words: too scared to buy one. Didn't feel comfortable. Felt weird about it. Things were changing and nobody had told them what to do about it. And on, and on. I didn't need a survey. I had a feedback group around me twenty-four hours a day.

I'm not trying to change the world. I'm trying to make products that work and cost what they should cost. Same features, same body-safe silicone, same lifespan as the brands charging two or three times as much — I've seen the factories, so I know what the difference is, and it isn't the product. And then the one thing they won't do. huxi gives you 60 days, opened, used, cash back. Not because I'm generous — because I think it takes that long to know whether something works for you, and because I'd rather you told me it didn't than told everyone else.

I don't test the products. Women do, at length, and I publish what they say. My job is the bit I'm good at: making the thing, keeping the price honest, and answering the email.

Ollie Van-Hay
Founder, huxi

N.B. My wife has signed this off.